Archive for the Personal Category

While I’d love to write about how awesome my adventures in the last three months have been, there is an unknown force inhibiting me from doing so. This force is preventing me from converting sections of my personal life into component portions of lexica. This will no doubt be something for me to consider in the future when I’m fighting off hordes of aliens to save my species.

Anyway, to prepare for the game design studies I’m about to undertake, I’ve been busying myself learning the Allegro C/C++ game library, amongst other things. I’ll probably be distributing some projects from experimenting with it here in the future. Maybe. I figure they’d be pretty interesting to people who are interested in game design/programming. Or, possibly, you’d just vomit since I haven’t written a good game since I was 13.

A significant, but minor project I’m considering is writing a short but sweet parody of Booshkies by Eric Drobile completely in Allegro. If you don’t know what Booshkies is, which is very, very likely, then you should go wear a hat made from bacon.

No matter where you are in the world, you’d know at least something about the United States election. Even if you were completely separated from all possible media and lived as a midget hermit in a subterranean alien cave in Antarctica, you would still subliminally or telepathically know that some dude who should have an afro is battling it on with an old dumb guy who defies the laws of old age and common sense. This is a phenomenon that I can only explain with Douglas Adams’ law of bad news.

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Who is Obama? This is what the subterranean Antarctican midget hermit thinks.

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The rest of the world breathes a heavy sigh of relief from the fact that it is finally coming to a close after a whole year of agonising campaigning and deceptive, vitriol-encrusted politics, but at the same time the world cringes at the thought of enduring another four years of Republican neo-conservative madness. If you’re reading this, this proves I need not explain why John McCain and Sarah Palin are at the very bottom rung of human evolution (mainly because you’re able to read, but also because you’ve likely heard it all before thanks to the immense social commentary available from anyone on the Internet that has a three-digit IQ).

What I never read about during all this campaigning, and wish more people WOULD write about or report, is how throughout all this a lot of TV reports were about how many blacks supported Barack Obama, or how many women supported Hillary Clinton when she was still running, as though it actually mattered. First, let me say that people who use anything relayed from TV to change their political views should not be allowed to vote. Regardless, when I was forced to watch this vomit, I rolled my eyes so far back in my skull they were almost severed at the nerve.

This is one of the only things that makes me want to watch two cranes dueling each other in order to calm myself down. How do they get away with this? It’s completely irrelevant and it is things like these that help catalyse people into being racist or sexist in the first place. It’s as though these news reporters have the audacity to think that people don’t care about the actual policies of the candidates, but about the private, static traits they have. This should have no place in the modern world, but, of course, the sad truth is that people do care about them — which is precisely why good politicians are never voted. Stupid people care — but we all know stupid people outnumber smart people, thanks to a variety of things, but I will just blame Generation X for being horny bastards again.

Smart thinking, America. Supporting someone because of their skin colour and not their policies? What’s next, supporting someone because of their diet or clothes? Oh wait, the latter has already happened with the Republican VP candidate. There are no limits to stupidity. The only thing that’s more pathetic is that this is how the mainstream candidates advertised themselves to people, because they know this is the only thing most of them care about, and if they didn’t appease this idiotic ritual they wouldn’t have a chance at getting elected. They don’t advertise their actual policies. Need proof? Go watch any of Obama’s speeches on Youtube; all of them are great speeches indeed, but is that really relevant?* This is what gets shitty politicians voted in, and people STILL haven’t learned from past mistakes.

*While Obama does talk about a lot of sensationalist rhetoric, he at least tries to advertise some of his policies here and there. This is much better than any other ‘mainstream’ candidate I’ve seen in history, and I’m not just talking about the US, so I commend him for trying to incorporate it through the thick skulls of most voters, while McCain goes the troglodytic route to smear Obama constantly, because he has absolutely no substance. Moron.

If their actual policies were judged then you might see people like Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich, or Mike Gravel — REAL politicians who cut out all the bullshit — given some attention. But people don’t want that; they’re too busy watching shitty mainstream media about how half of all Americans are obese while scarfing down a super-sized Big Mac meal and are utterly amazed by Britney Spears’ baby’s grandmother’s sister who’s had an abortion with Jessica Alba. No, just vote for the guy who keeps the status quo while allowing Wall Street criminals to continue stealing all of your money.

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Most of the candidates were so horribly pathetic. McCain doesn’t even know how to use a computer and is basically a complete dumbass, and Obama uses the word ‘change’ so much it makes me want to have ten aneurysms in a row while drilling my skull with a pneumatic toothpick. I like Obama, but you have to look at the some cold hard facts: he supports AIPAC, or ‘legalised terrorism’. He supports FISA, which unconstitutionally strips you of your freedoms, and he isn’t against invading Iran. If his positions on these major issues weren’t the same as everyone else’s, I’d happily consume his sensationalism. Unfortunately, not everyone is perfect.

Indeed, the US election sucks. It sucks because it reminds me of the melancholic fact that there are so many sub-humans that share most of my DNA; even if Obama does win, this truth remains: millions of my own species voted for the other… thing. It disgusts me, and will disgust future generations when or if they evolve to my level. That being said, Australian politics is not only worse, but much more boring. Kevin Rudd is quite possibly the most incompetent fool I’ve ever had the displeasure of seeing in power. But I will save that story for another time, where he will have Australian Internet traffic under fascist rule, just like his friends do in China, North Korea, and Burma.

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I’ll stop myself here before I go on a tangent, or I’d have to watch another crane duel. November 4th, hurry up already.

A short while ago, a remake of Sierra’s early 90s game Quest for Glory II was released. Unfortunately, the adventure genre of gaming has become a very niche market, mainly because they require a small amount of intelligence to play, which most people do not possess.

If you’re a real gamer, or for some reason you were unaware of the remake, you can get it here.

The remake itself is pretty spectacular. The combat system was heavily remade and is pretty fun, if a bit slow, and the graphics stay true to what Sierra’s VGA games generally looked like.

The only gripes I had with the entire game was the excruciatingly slow speed of combat, and the fact that even on maximum speed the whole game itself felt like it was playing 50% slower than it should be. Also, it appeared that the WIT ‘bug’ remained — that is, if you do WIT you can only complete the Wizard’s ending. I found this to be very annoying, what if I wanted to do WIT and I was a Fighter, Thief, or Paladin? You can’t. Bad game design!

Unfortunately, being a remake, there was very little ‘wow’ feeling, simply because I’ve played this game many years ago and remember everything that happens — an unfortunate side-effect of having a good memory. This wasn’t the case when I played the King’s Quest 1, 2 and 3 remakes because I’m of the age where I wasn’t even born when those originals were released. My brother actually visited me recently and thought he was cool because he had it on his miniature PC, and even though he also had played the original and was much older than me, he couldn’t remember a thing from it. I laughed at him and told him how I’ve known about its development for about five years. This made me feel better than him.

Because being a critic is fun (thanks Zero Punctuation for pointing that out), here is a list of annoyances from the game:

A handful of default messages were ripped off from QFG3. While not noticeable to some people, perceptive players like me rolled their eyes a little.

Some portraits, while not drawn bad, just look plain silly. No, no, plain RETARDED. Keapon Luffin and Zayishah are prime examples. I certainly didn’t imagine Keapon to look like a cross between a squashed egg, a stool, and a square-faced shaved gorilla.

Some combat sound effects were a bit weird. Fighting Uhura was almost embarrassing — it was like each sword strike was giving her… uh, strange excitement.

While the simplified alley system is much less annoying than the original, it reminded me too much of the early Might and Magics, or Elder Scrolls. I really hated the navigation in those games.

Some defensive controls seemed to not be very fluid, although may be due to dodge/parry skills.

The problem with the slow pace of the game is that there’s not enough to do in the linear time frame. This was a problem in the original too, but combat and travel wasn’t so ’slow’ so it felt a lot more fluid.

Sure, you can sleep for days straight, but that doesn’t seem normal and kind of ruins the atmosphere of the game. There was so little to do I had stupidly high stats by the time the first elemental attacked simply because I had nothing to do so I spent a lot of time enjoying the extremely good combat system. Other such minor flaws in fluidity exist at the end — it’s very simple, but Shema or Shameen were a bit more animated when they congratulated you. In the remake they just kind of sit there like stuffed parrots, which really destroyed the emotion that was prevalent in the EGA version.

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Numbers don’t always equate to skill. Story of my life.

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Anyway, QFG2VGA was highly enjoyable for me, because it reminded me of days where computer games were designed without spending 99% of the budget on graphics, unlike a lot of modern games today, but rather having it spent on game designers and writers. People will remember games like these forever and have special memories associated with them. I don’t totally blame the game industry though, I blame people like you for paying for these shitty games with no story or gameplay, because you think they look nice or they give you an erection or some other sub-60 IQ rhetoric. The producers then think, ‘hey, these morons are giving us money to PRODUCE CRAP so let’s PRODUCE MORE CRAP’. Barf. Stop funding these fools, fools.

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I’ll leave you with one of the more appropriate easter eggs in the game. You will thank me for this, trust me.

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If you crave more adventure gaming, I highly recommend A Tale of Two Kingdoms. This is not a remake, but an entire new game — it is completely original. I wrote a pile of vomit about it around a year ago.